The World According to Bertie

Irene waved a hand airily. “I did not interpret it in that way at all,” she said. “Have you been seeing patients?”

Dr Fairbairn waited until Irene had sat herself down before he continued. “No, not at all. I’m working on a paper, long-distance, with Ettore Esteves Balado,” he said. “He’s an Argentine I met on the circuit, and we found ourselves interested in much the same area. We’re writing on the Lacanian perspective on transference.” He paused, smiling at Irene. “And it’s going very well. We’re practically finished.”

Irene looked at his blue linen jacket. Linen was such a difficult material, with its propensity to crumple. She had a white 288 A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation linen blouse with a matching skirt which she loved to wear, but which crumpled so quickly that after five or ten minutes she looked like, well, Stuart had put it rather tactlessly, like a handkerchief that had been left out in the rain. It was an odd analogy, that, and she wondered what the Lacanian interpretation might be. We did not choose our words simply for their expressive power; our words were the manifestation of the conflicts of our unconscious, indeed, they themselves formed the unconscious itself. Lacan had made that quite clear, and Irene was inclined to agree. She did not think that we could find a stable unconscious; our unconscious was really a stream of interactions between words that we used to express our desires and conflicts.

So when Stuart had made those remarks about a handkerchief in the rain, he did not mean that her linen outfit was a handkerchief left out in the rain, or indeed even looked like one.

What his words revealed was that he feared disorder (or rain) and that he wanted her, Irene, to be perfect, to be ironed. And that, of course, suggested that he looked to her for stability to control his sense of impermanence and flux, his confusion. No surprises there, she thought: of course he did. Stuart might have many good points, but in Irene’s view, strength – what people called backbone, or even bottom – was not Stuart’s strong suit.

Mind you, it was strange that people should use the word

“bottom” for strength or courage. What was the Lacanian significance of that?

Her eyes returned to Dr Fairbairn’s blue linen jacket. He had said something, she recalled, about the combination of fibres in the jacket, and that must be the reason it looked so uncrumpled. The question in her mind, though, was: at what point did the insertion of other fibres deprive the material of the qualities of real linen? If it was merely a treatment of the linen, then that was one thing; if, however, it involved polyester or something of that sort, could one still call it linen?

Dr Fairbairn, aware of her gaze, fingered the cuff of his A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation 289

sleeve self-consciously. “I’ll give you a copy of the paper,” he said. “When it’s finished. I know of your interest in these things.”

“Argentina?” said Irene.

“Yes, Buenos Aires. My friend Ettore is one of their best-known analysts there. He has a very extensive practice.”

Irene nodded. She had heard that there were more psycho-analysts in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world, but was not sure why this should be. It seemed strange to her that a country associated with gauchos and pampas should also have all those analysts. She asked Dr Fairbairn why.

“Ah!” he said. “That is the question for Argentine analysts.

They’re immensely fortunate, you know. Everyone, or virtually everyone, in Buenos Aires is undergoing analysis. It’s very common indeed.”

“Surprising,” said Irene. “Mind you, the Argentine psyche is perhaps a bit . . .”

“Fractured,” said Dr Fairbairn. “They’re a very charming people, but they have a somewhat confused history. They go in for dreams, the South Americans. Look at Peronism. What did it mean? Evita? Who was she?”

For a moment, they were both silent. Then he continued. “I think the reason Freud is so popular in Argentina is, like most of these things, explained by a series of coincidences. It just so happened that at the time that Freudian ideas were becoming popular in Europe, the Argentine public was in a receptive mood for scientific ideas. You must remember that Argentina in the twenties and thirties was a very fashionable place.”

“Oh yes,” said Irene. She was not going to let him think that she knew nothing about all that. “The tango . . .”

“Hah!” said Dr Fairbairn. “The tango was actually invented by a Uruguayan. The Argentines claimed him, but he was born in Uruguay.”

“Oh.”

“But no matter,” he went on. “The point is that La Jornada, one of the most popular newspapers in Buenos Aires, actually

290 A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation started a daily psychoanalytical column in the early thirties. It appeared under the byline ‘Freudiano,’ and readers were invited to send in their dreams for analysis by Freudiano. The paper then told them what the dreams revealed – all in Freudian terms.”

“But what a brilliant idea!” said Irene. “Perhaps The Scotsman could do that.”

“Are we not perhaps a little too inhibited in Scotland?” asked Dr Fairbairn.

“But that’s exactly the problem,” said Irene heatedly. “If we were to . . . to open up a bit, then we would all become so much more . . .”

Dr Fairbairn waited. “Like the Argentines?” he ventured.

Irene laughed. “I’m not sure,” she said. “They’ve had a tendency to go in for dictators, haven’t they?”

“Father figures,” said Dr Fairbairn.

“And generals too,” added Irene.

“Military figures,” said Dr Fairbairn.